Some syntactic features of Swazi English

The paper describes some stable syntactic features of Swazi English. It is thus an extension and elaboration of the discussion in Kamwangamalu and Chisanga’s characterization of Swazi English. They point out that the wh‐word is placed last in question formation, time expressions such as ‘I met him last of last week’ occur and idiomatic expressions such as ‘To see once is to see twice’ are used. This paper discusses, among others, the use of the modal auxiliary must, the use of as to, the conflation of the emphatic do with the simple past tense and dangling modifiers as other stable syntactic features of Swazi English. It then elaborates on the use of idiomatic expressions, since in Kamwangamalu and Chisanga’s discussion only a few were mentioned. Finally, as there are few descriptions of Swazi English, the paper advocates more studies on the subject.